She didn’t care about the neighbours’ dirty looks. But the smells, the defecation, the missing shoe of Ronnie’s that delayed a trip to the doctor – these were things she didn’t need. The trip to the doctor was a checkup; they wanted to check his vital signs and say what percentile he was in for this or that, was he tall or short or fat for a two-and-a-half-year-old. She found the shoe later, masticated, slimy with saliva. She rinsed it with detergent, thinking that would have to do. Worst of all was the morning when, on leaving the house, she saw there had been a hit-and-run. The body was inert. It made a neat crescent shape on the road. It was one of the cubs; she knew it by its ears, the colouring on its paws. The runt of the litter. Ronnie gazed at it, dismayed.

‘What happened, Mama?’

‘A car. A car is what happened, sweetheart.’

She was about to call the council when out came Old Gammon from number 40. Putting on a pair of gardening gloves, he lifted the lifeless fox and slid it into a heavy-duty bin bag, then dumped it in his wheelie bin like any other bag of rubbish.

‘Pickup day,’ he said to her. ‘They won’t be long.’ Then he muttered something about needing to scrub the bin out later. His tone said, I told you so, this is what you get for feeding them.

With her hand forced, she spoke to the agent and threatened to call someone herself. ‘Name’s Bruce. He’s very nice. He has a .22 Winchester, pops them off from the back window.’ She had seen this on the internet. It was legal, apparently. She saw her husband’s horrified look as he glanced over from the sofa. He was gentle by nature; he never so much as raised his voice. She flapped her hand at him: don’t worry.

‘How does that sound, alright? We can send you the invoice when he’s done.’

Her bluff had the desired effect. A fox man arrived promptly. He wore dungarees, looked the part.

‘My word, they’ve had a field day. You’ve got yourself a breeding earth. That big old tree stump in the ground, it’s rotted out from the inside. That’s what they’ve been burrowing to get to. A bit of shelter for them – very cosy, I imagine.’

A breeding earth. So that was what it was called.

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘We’ve strict instructions from the client to be humane and sympathetic.’

‘Hmm,’ said Nina. ‘That’s why I’m worried.’